Investors and gamblers take note: your betting decisions and strategy are determined, in part, by your genes.
University
of California, Berkeley, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(UIUC) researchers have shown that betting decisions in a simple
competitive game are influenced by the specific variants of
dopamine-regulating genes in a person's brain.
Dopamine is a
neurotransmitter -- a chemical released by brain cells to signal other
brain cells -- that is a key part of the brain's reward and
pleasure-seeking system. Dopamine deficiency leads to Parkinson's
disease, while disruption of the dopamine network is linked to numerous
psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, including schizophrenia,
depression and dementia.
While previous studies have
shown the important role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in social
interactions, this is the first study tying these interactions to
specific genes that govern dopamine functioning.
"This study
shows that genes influence complex social behavior, in this case
strategic behavior," said study leader Ming Hsu, an assistant professor
of marketing in UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a member of
the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. "We now have some clues about
the neural mechanisms through which our genes affect behavior."
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The
implications for business are potentially vast but unclear, Hsu said,
though one possibility is training workforces to be more strategic. But
the findings could significantly affect our understanding of diseases
involving dopamine, such as schizophrenia, as well as disorders of
social interaction, such as autism.
"When people talk about
dopamine dysfunction, schizophrenia is one of the first diseases that
come to mind," Hsu said, noting that the disease involves a very complex
pattern of social and decision making deficits. "To the degree that we
can better understand ubiquitous social interactions in strategic
settings, it may help us understand how to characterize and eventually
treat the social deficits that are symptoms of diseases like
schizophrenia."
Hsu, UIUC graduate student Eric Set and their
colleagues, including Richard P. Ebstein and Soo Hong Chew from the
National University of Singapore, will publish their findings in the
online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Two brain areas involved in competition
Hsu
established two years ago that when people engage in competitive social
interactions, such as betting games, they primarily call upon two areas
of the brain: the medial prefrontal cortex, which is the executive part
of the brain, and the striatum, which deals with motivation and is
crucial for learning to acquire rewards. Functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) scans showed that people playing these games displayed
intense activity in these areas.
"If you think of the brain as a
computing machine, these are areas that take inputs, crank them through
an algorithm, and translate them into behavioral outputs," Hsu said.
"What is really interesting about these areas is that both are
innervated by neurons that use dopamine."
Hsu and Set of UIUC's
Department of Economics wanted to determine which genes involved in
regulating dopamine concentrations in these brain areas were associated
with strategic thinking, so they enlisted as subjects a group of 217
undergraduates at the National University of Singapore, all of whom had
had their genomes scanned for some 700,000 genetic variants. The
researchers focused on only 143 variants within 12 genes involved in
regulating dopamine. Some of the 12 are primarily involved in regulating
dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, while others primarily regulate
dopamine in the striatum.
The competition was a game called
patent race, commonly used by social scientists to study social
interactions. It involves one person betting, via computer, with an
anonymous opponent.
"We know from brain imaging studies that when
people compete against one another, they actually engage in two
distinct types of learning processes," Set said, referring to Hsu's 2012
study. "One type involves learning purely from the consequences of your
own actions, called reinforcement learning. The other is a bit more
sophisticated, called belief learning, where people try to make a mental
model of the other players, in order to anticipate and respond to their
actions."
Trial-and-error learning vs belief learning
Using
a mathematical model of brain function during competitive social
interactions, Hsu and Set correlated performance in reinforcement
learning and belief learning with different variants or mutations of the
12 dopamine-related genes, and discovered a distinct difference.
They
found that differences in belief learning -- the degree to which
players were able to anticipate and respond to the actions of others, or
to imagine what their competitor is thinking and respond strategically
-- was associated with variation in three genes which primarily affect
dopamine functioning in the medial prefrontal cortex.
In
contrast, differences in trial-and-error reinforcement learning -- how
quickly they forget past experiences and how quickly they change
strategy -- was associated with variation in two genes that primarily
affect striatal dopamine.
Hsu said that the findings correlate
well with previous brain studies showing that the prefrontal cortex is
involved in belief learning, while the striatum is involved in
reinforcement learning.
"We were surprised by the degree of
overlap, but it hints at the power of studying the neural and genetic
levels under a single mathematical framework, which is only beginning in
this area," he said.
Hsu is currently collaborating with other
scientists to correlate career achievements in older adults with genes
and performance on competitive games, to see which brain regions and
types of learning are most important for different kinds of success in
life.
Story Source:
http://www.sciencedaily.com
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